Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Saturday November 22, 2003 @10:02AM
from the verifiable-results dept.

DDumitru writes "Wired reports
that California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley will require all electronic
voting systems be equipped with a voter-verifiable paper receipt. This receipt
will not be retained by the voter, but deposited at the polls and may be used
to audit electronic election results.
All new voting system installed after July 1, 2005 must include the new printers.
Existing systems, including the systems already installed in four counties must
be retrofitted by July 2006.
It looks like the public outcry about Diebold and other voting equipment manufacturers
has been heard, at least in a very major market for these machines in the US.
It should be very difficult for other states to not follow suit."

Anything required by California is almost de facto a national standard. It probably isn't worth it for voting-machine manufacturers to make two different models, one for sale to CA and one for sale to other states.

You see this in lost of industries: low- and zero-emission vehicles are available nationwide primarily because CA required them. And that's why the banking lobby fought so hard against privacy regulations in CA: because if they had to redo their IT systems for CA, then basically it becomes available to their customers in all states. Cheaper to do it for eveyone than just people in one state.

The software needs to be open if not free. Paper reciepts are a great first step, but the system can still be manipulated within paper counting accuracy. For the sytem to be an improvement, it should do better and it can. Open software can be verified for the soundness of it's methods and rigourously tested by interested parties. The results of that kind of testing would be secure and accurate voting that's really better than paper.

Closed source junk, on the other hand, is imposible to test and verify.

No, my argument was stupid and about something totally invalidated by the article. I wasn't awake yet.

But now that you mention it... If the machines are opensource, aren't the people loading the code into the machines ALSO the ones who've been loading uncertified code into the machines? How do the voters know that the source code they've seen is what's in the machine?

Uh, the Buchanan problem was due to a ballot designed by DEMOCRATIC election supervisors. Besides that, the flawed ballot design was not the issue in the big court battle: the counting method (or lack of one) was.

California would be a difficult one to rig, even if Diebold wanted to. It would look exceedingly suspicious if it went to GWB (yes, they elected the Republican candidate for Governor, but that's a Republican who is far more liberal than Bush is.)

I hope you're right. The problem is that when things get screwed up at the state level, the only recourse is to turn to the federal government -- and who runs the federal government right now? That's right...

Well, okay, there is another recourse -- "1776 is the cure for 1984" and all that. But I really don't expect to see that happen, no matter how egregious the vote fraud gets.

I wonder if diebold CEO is still promising (and meaning it) to deliver W..Oh, wait.The printer was delayed until AFTER the next major election.

Give it a rest.

EVERY elected executive-branch office in California is held by a Democrat except the new gubernator - who is a flaming liberal on all issues except partly on fiscal AND married into the Kennedy clan and advised by them.

Way to deflect the issue, kids. "yeah yeah, we have to be accountable... but in two years". Too bad they're going to have a little thing like "presidential election" first before all that comes about, huh?

You have to give the counties an appropriate amount of time to purchase voting machines that work this way. Not all of them have money falling out of their pockets that they can spend on brand-new voting machines (again), if they happened to recently purchase some machines without these features. Granted, those counties probably should not have purchased such machines, but if you force this on them too soon, you will get a backlash because the counties will have to pull the money from other parts of their budget.. AND that would piss voters off.

What democracy!!! Last time i looked, we lived in a republic. Wow, schools have certainly gone from bad to hopeless, when even the type of govermnent is not know. Just so we all know, the public does not directly elect the president. Its the electorial college that does that. So its possible to have candidates who have more total votes and still loose the election.

Learn the type of govermnent you have and then youll be able to properly complain about it.

To elaborate: in the US and in many other countries, republicanism is the mechanism of democracy. We are both (in theory) a republic and a democracy -- a republican democracy, or a democratic republic (that latter term, unfortunately, having been recently hijacked by some very undemocratic republics.) Anyone who says "the US is a republic, not a democracy" and thinks it proves something is an idiot.

republic = government rule by a select group, can be elected by the people or not.

I agree in principle with what you are saying, but most people who make a point of saying the US is not a democracy are basing on that majority rule concept. A lot of people think that if the majority wants it, it should be law... whereas there is no such principle in the country and ample evidence that is what the founding fathers were trying to avoid.

Having a Represenative Republic ensures that the medium guys get as much attention as the smaller guys.

I might be wrong, but isn't over 50% of the population in 3 states? New York, California, Florida? In such, these 3 states COULD control the presidency, find a candidate that is willing to sell out the other 47 states and give these guys anything they want and there ya have it. The logistics of giving everything ya promised is a little tough, but it could be done with enoug

I might be wrong, but isn't over 50% of the population in 3 states? New York, California, Florida?

No, you're very wrong. If that was the case, Gore would have moved his entire campaign to Florida, campaigned for Nader in every other state in a deal to keep him from being added to the ballot in Florida, and would have won the election easily.

Also, states are allowed to split their electoral votes. Some states themselves forbid their electors from voting for anyone but the candidate with a plurality of

Ah, the old false dichotomy between a democracy and a representative republic. The US is, of course, both. Check your dictionary.

But the electoral failure three years ago was a result of something else that few people other than historians ever mention: The US Electoral College was in fact set up by the Founding Fathers as an explicit check on the power of the masses. They were afraid of a popular demagogue winning an election and overthrowing the established order. Not an irrational fear, as illustrated by several cases in the 20th century where this happened in some other countries. So they devised that peculiar scheme whereby the voters choose "electors", presumably well-to-do members of the established parties, and those electors then decide amongst themselves who should be the president. This system can overturn the wishes of the masses, and that's exactly what it was designed to do.

In this case, it did have some help from a court that ordered a halt to the vote counting, so that one state could "choose" the desired set of electors. This is something that the Founding Fathers apparently didn't anticipate, and has thrown a major monkey wrench into the works. But this isn't the first time; check out the 1876 election for a precedent. ("Rutherford Tilden election" is a good set of keywords for a search site.)

Now we have the have the phenomenon of new voting equipment being widely installed, from a company whose CEO has brazenly promised one party that he can deliver states to them in the next election. Information about this equipment supports his claim fully.

The United States is not a democracy, it's a Representative Republic. The distinction is important

*sigh*

What do you think democracy is?

Look, there's a bunch of people who insist that "government types" is like something out of Sid Meier's Civilization. You get Despotism, Communism, Republicanism, Democracy, et al, and they're all contradictory.

This is not true. Most of these are measures, or they describe a constitutional arrangement. For example, a monarchy and a republic are opposites (or rather, mutually exclusive), however, a republic can be democratic, communist, or a whole host of other things. Indeed, a monarchy can be democratic.

Confused? The latter sounds impossible?

A Democracy is a regime where the legislature is answerable to the governed. This is currently the case in the United States and a whole host of other countries. The US achieves this by having a directly elected congress and, currently, a directly elected senate. Thus, both are answerable to the people, and as a law cannot be passed without being approved by both houses, it furfills the definition of democratic. "Aha", I pretend to hear you cry, "But the US also has a constitution with a bill of rights in it preventing laws from being passed that the people's representatives might be in favour of!" Well, sure, but it's a constitution that can be changed, again, by the people. There's no office that can veto changes to the constitution, and currently, with constitutional changes requiring the consent of bodies (states, senate, etc) that are all answerable to the governed, it remains democratic.

Does this mean that the US is not a Republic? Far from it. Indeed, even Britain and most of the other European monarchies are democratic, because, for now, those monarchs have agreed to let their elected legislatures be responsible for all lawmaking, and the executives in those countries, however formed, are bound by those laws.

Thus, a "Representative Republic" is not an opposite of a democracy, it is a democracy.

People tend to think that democracy means more than it actually does. I regularly read people who think that democracy means "rule by plebicite" or some other such nonsense. Bollocks.

Further, I also read a lot of too-clever-for-their-own-good types who propose that America isn't democratic because they read the Federalist Papers and, boy howdy, those papers say it's a Republic and not Democratic. Well, sure. And back in the late 1700s, there were no guarantees that individual states would be democratic, and the constitution left the choice of how to appoint Senators up to the states.

The world has moved on since then. Senators are now directly elected. No states are undemocratic. The US is currently a democracy, and thanks to the 14th Amendment, that's going to be difficult to change except by changing the current constitution.

If a machine runs out of paper, he said, Sequoia would recommend that poll workers remove the entire printer component and replace it with a new one so that workers do not need to touch the receipt roll.

This is yet another example of the ridiculous double standard. If the machine could have the paper replaced like normal reciept printers, you would be clamoring about the security of the paper record. They make it so that they never have to touch the thing, and you complain about the cost. It's one or the other, guys. Things cost money.

It looks like the public outcry about Diebold and other voting equipment manufacturers has been heard, at least in a very major market for these machines in the US. It should be very difficult for other states to not follow suit.

Will Diebold voting machines should now carry warnings that state, "This voting machine contains technology known by the State of California to be harmful to Democracy"?

Please, do tell how the representative government of the United States is not democratic.Among others, www.m-w.com defines "democracy" as

1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

To elaborate, I always thought that a democracy was a government system where every eligible citizen voted on every issue, while a republic was a system where the individual citizens chose representatives to do the work of government for them.

Sure, but I don't quite understand why you are implying that a republic cannot be democratic. Is the United States not a democratic republic? The fact that it is a representative democracy does not make it undemocratic.

This "republic" vs "democracy" nitpicking is some sort of wierd semantic quibble popular in certain right-wing circles in the United States. I think it leads to some core ideological point or other. Perhaps it is simply that "Republican" is a better name for a political party than "Democrat". Who knows? What's wierd about it is not that they make the distinction, but that they insist that everyone else make the same distinction.

Some advice to the nitpickers, then. Words mean what they mean. Saying "the di

I know you are making a jab at the justice system, but it's funny you mention the 2000 presdential election. If it were a true democracy, Al Gore would be president, because he won the popular vote. The business down in Florida would not even have mattered, it's the electoral college that threw everything out of whack.:D

What exactly is wrong with taking a piece of paper with every candidate's name on it, and making an "X" beside your choice? This is the way things are done in Canadian federal elections, no fancy-pants touch screens or butterfly ballots or any other nonsense. Everyone gets a ballot with a standard design, from Victoria to Halifax.

Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest. If technology doesn't simplify life, what use is it?

Not just directed at you, but: Earth to Slashdotters. This does not require electronic voting. Marking a piece of paper with an "x" would be perfectly valid. This simply requires electronic systems to work properly and to be audit-able. Bubble cards, etc. are still ok.

One nice advantage of electronic voting is it has the potential to be very easy/quick to set up an election; there are very many other positives. This decision addresses the one giant negative associated with the process.

I think paper ballots probably are the best. The process is more transparent. Although fraud can be committed with paper ballots.

...Everyone gets a ballot with a standard design, from Victoria to Halifax...

However, there are some differences between the American and Canadian electoral systems. Please remember, the US Constitution explicitedly puts the responsibility for conducting elections in the hands of the states, for example Section 4, Clause 1 on the election of Senators and Representatives. Furthermore, as witnessed in the last election, we use an Electoral College to pick the President. The selection of the Electoral College members is decided by the individual states. So the Federal government cannot mandate a uniform ballot. (Your statement also ignores the fact that most, if not all, localities use the national elections as opportunities to decide local issues that require some customization of the ballot.)

To do what you propose, while it has merit, would require a Constitutional amendment. One that is not likely to be passed because the states would have to give up some of their power.

While true, nothing is stopping the states from (at least trying to) getting together and deciding on a standard format. Even if some things are added on at the end (referendums and such) template for voting should be consistent.

Too labor intensive. Columbus, OH where I live often has problems finding enough poll workers. Ballots can be very large when you have races for municpal, state, and federal offices (judges, county engineer, auditor, dog catcher, council, reps, executives - its a long list) plus ballot isues to deal with.

In Canada the election results are always out
soon after the polls close in the West.
In fact some people in the West complain that
the results are known before many people vote
after work in BC and their vote doesn't count
as much as others. I don't buy that complain but
it shows that results get tallied up very quickly.

We don't care who they tried to vote for. That's a null vote, and that's that.

That is the standard solution, but throwing away someone's vote is undemocratic and undesirable, so if there is now a better solution available (e.g. a touchscreen that makes the voter's vote is valid before it gets submitted), why not use it?

Why does the bill allow such a long timeline? By requiring a paper trail in 2005 (not in time for the next presidentail election), the legislature is clearly saying there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Why does it not need to be addressed in time for the Presidentail election?

Because that is only a year away. You have obviously never worked for government. Design (if applicable), procurement, setup and training for an election system could never occur in under a year. It could be possible, but with fundamental changes in the system. I would rather see it take 2 years, and have it done right, then have them rush a shoddy system into place for 2004.

(1) The receipt includes a voter ID and the results of their vote. This totally violates the anonymity of the voting process but does allow for counting.

(2) If the receipts include no voter ID but just some form of transaction ID, then why print them off at all? Just run some report at any point during the voting process to see the tally? Why not? If the voting system is compromised, then there is no way to ensure the paper votes with the transaction id, generated from the compromised system can be trusted either.

As I see it, this solution does not add value without removing rights.

You missed the point. The reason to print the receipt after each person votes rather than printing off a report later is so the voter can see the receipt and verify that the machine has correctly recorded the vote. Even if not every voter bothers to check the receipt, enough will that a malfunctioning machine will be detected. The receipts than allow for a recount to be done later if there is some doubt about the machine's accuracy or if the machine crashes.

You're missing the point. Anonymity is lost in case the machine is flagged as untrustworthy. Every person who complains that they didn't see their vote on the printout can be tracked, since they must divulge their identity before voting.

So if the machine is deficient on purpose, you could get a list of all people who didn't vote for candidate X, including name and address. The list won't be complete since not everyone will complain, but it'll be large enough to send Vinnie over for a "talk" later on if you

"The receipts than allow for a recount to be done later if there is some doubt about the machine's accuracy or if the machine crashes."

Like hell they do. They're receipts, which means the voter leaves the polling place with them in hand. That makes them even less reliable than the machines we're talking about. As soon as the state asks for receipts to come back for a recount, each party will turn in a half a million such receipts they "found" somewhere.

With an appropriate cryptographic solution the receipt doesn't have to reveal information about the actual vote. And still it is possible with the right algorithm to verify, that this vote was actually counted in the final result. Unfortunately I don't remember the rest of the details about how this should work.

You missed the following: suppose the voter votes for one candidate, but swaps the printout receipt just before placing it in the sealed box. Now the results in the machine are different from the paper results. Which one will be trusted?

BTW, the article states that you don't get to touch the receipt. You simply view it inside the printer, behind a piece of glass.

I don't know why they would do it. I was just pushing the idea. What's troubling is that they could in that type of system. Sooner or later, groups of people would get the idea to synchronize their vote tampering and then it would be significant. Maybe they want to just sabotage the election, delay a result by a couple of weeks. Where there's a way, there's a motive, I guess.

What's so hard about using a sharpie to fill in a (relatively large) bubble next to the canidate you want to vote for? Then use any computer technology you want to count the bubbles. Sounds cheaper to me. The paper trail is there, and only what needs to be automated (counting) is.

Maybe setup a few touchscreen kiosks for those who really need it. For the rest of us, I want my pen and paper.

This is pretty much the way San Mateo County voters have been voting for years. We use black markers to connect two dark lines for the candidate we want, and then feed our ballots into an optical scanner which records our votes. It's a simple, elegant solution.

It's surprising that this technology hasn't gotten more media attention. People following the news would think the only three ways to vote are old voting machines, punch cards and DRE!

One of the biggest reasons? Blind people. DRE machines are *huge* for blind people, because they can be supplemented with an audio interface that help them vote unassisted. Computer-mediated voting allows any number of interfaces to be presented in order to overcome various disabilities.

Some of the biggest advocates for DRE machines have been advocates for the blind and other disabled people who have previously required help at the polls.

From a procedural standpoint, if people are required to take the receipt and bring it to an official stating "hey, I didn't vote for that guy", then anonymity is effectively lost. How many people are going to think twice about complaining in that case?

Voter: Sheriff, I just voted with that machine over there, and it said I voted for Bubba Smith.

Fucking AC, you're the one who should read the story. Who said anything about voters taking receipts home? It's about some technical oversight guy looking you in the eye and asking "did you vote for xxx?". It's about intimidation. You've got two choices if there's a problem: either you complain that the machine is wrong and you didn't vote that way (and if the machine is rigged, those people have your name and address now), or you keep your mouth shut and you've just voted for somebody you didn't want to vo

With traditional paper voting, you keep the piece of paper in your hand until it's in the box. The only visual verification is
that somebody saw you put a piece of paper in the box. Any piece of paper, it doesn't matter. When the votes are counted later, if your vote is disqualified, then no-one knows you did it.

With this system, the votes are printed and visible to you. If you're going to complain that the machine stuffed up, you have to tell someone. This person will ask you who you voted for, and will want to verify that the printout contains another candidate's name. Once they've verified that your candidate and the the one on paper are different, some action will be taken to fix the machine. But by then, the official will know how you intended to vote. Your vote is no longer anonymous.

Of course, the circle has to be completely filled in. But the again, if you can't fill in a circle then you probably shouldn't be voting.
Counting the votes is relatively fast. We usually know within 2 hours of the polls closing who has won.
Why do we even NEED an electronic system?

Sounds like a scantron system to me. A machine is counting your votes already. A machine might also be adding the county results up for you too.

Because a scantron system can screw up, and destroy all of the ballots, so paper is dangerous.

Plus paper is expensive. Plus counting is only fast if you have the people (or the machines, which are dangerous) to do it.

Plus scantrons are ambiguous. There's a recognition issue there, and while they're pretty good, the margin of error is nonzero (as it is with all counting systems, but here it's measurably non-zero). And then you'd get into "pregnant chad" lands again, just with, I dunno, "pregnant bubbles".

Look, the paper trail isn't the important part. The important part is that a hardcoded audit trail is available, and that it can be easily spot checked to ensure that the machines are working as they are supposed to be working.

Electronic voting is the right way to go, in the future. As you scale the number of people, the logistics get insane, and wasting money on elections is not what I want a government to be doing. We're talking about *counting* here, something that's been done since the first person looked at his fingers.

What you need, though, is a foolproof system. A system without friggin' software, a system running on bare metal, just logic gates, writing to a verifiably safe write-once-read-many storage medium.

Unfortunately, in order to develop that, you need to have some technical expertise, which Diebold and co definitely don't have. Come on. Commercial off-the-shelf crap? Jeez. Take out a damned electronics CAD package and design something that doesn't suck.

That's ridiculous. It'll be easy for other states to not follow suit; what will be difficult will be for the companies who make these machines to avoid producing them with this as an option. This, as a result, will make it easier for states to follow California's example, if they are so inclined. But sticking to the status quo of electonic voting has not become more difficult yet.

The problem with this little scheme is that the printer generates a linear log of votes, and this might be used to figure out who voted for whom. There goes your anonymity. People might be afraid of retribution for voting the wrong way.

I recommend using blinded signature techniques to solve the problem. "Poll watchers" will network their computers to the voting machine, and when someone votes, their machines will sign the voter's choices through a blinding mechanism that will validate the vote. The vote will then be released to the poll watchers' machines mixed with "chaff".

The chaff would be generated prior to the vote; a large number of votes would be created, tabulated and signed blindly. Each vote broadcast on the network would be mixed with ten or so randomly chosen chaff votes. At the end of voting, the unused chaff votes would be tabulated again, the number of chaff votes cast would be calculated and subtracted from the total, giving the true number of votes cast.

What is to stop the voting machine from modifying the ballot choices right as the voter casts them? Your system provides no integrity guarantees at all: we need a system in which the voter actually looks at a piece of paper with his choices and validates by eyeball that the votes are correct, and in which this very same piece of paper that the voter validated is used in random manual recounts. Nothing else provides any confidence in integrity.

There's already a linear log of votes - votes at the bottom of the ballot box were turned in first. And that doesn't change - THE VOTING MACHINE DOES NOT COUNT VOTES! It just produces paper ballots with greater accuracy than previous methods. That's it. It's the paper ballots that count.

If you want to see a really clever electronic voting system, check out VoteHere. They use paper receipts that basically records a hash of your vote, so your receipt cannot prove to anyone who was not looking over your shoulder when you cast the ballot what that vote was, but still allows you to prove that your vote has/has not been changed after the polls close. As VoteHere points out, authoritative paper receipts really just turn the machine into a very expensive pencil, when they offer the potential to do so much more.

By the way, I have no ties to VoteHere, I've just been studying electronic voting a lot lately.

Of course, this system has weaknesses, as will any system which enforces both authenticity and anonymity, but even if it cannot be protected against all attacks, it at least lets you know when an attack is happening, which is a huge step up from most paper and even electronic systems.

RTFP/RTFM. You can't do vote-buying with the vote-here scheme, because the receipt doesn't say who you voted for. The receipt just shows a cryptographic hash of your vote that you can use to confirm that the vote didn't change. You can verify that the hash corresponds to the vote you intend in the voting booth, but once you leave the poll, there's no information left to prove who you voted for. The ballot remains anonymous, and your vote is secret.

To rig an election like that (actually fudging the paper ballots) you need to do it on such a scale to make a difference that enough people would see it and it would become clear it was systemic. Keep in mind, the machine is not going to know who will be dilligent as to look at their ballot and who will not be. It will just randomly fudge ballots.

That's irrelevant. The important thing is that the audit trail is now possible. The majority of voters don't even bother to vote - should they all be made to?

I don't think that electronic voting is really an advantage over traditional methods, especially as it's so open to abuse. But if it is implemented, then at least the possibility of verifying results is now there.

I'm sure some smartass will just claim their voting receipt is different from their vote just to kick up a stink though... enough of these could throw the thing into more doubt.

the point isn't that people will get the receipt and double-check it. although that will be a nice side-effect.

the point is that we'll have a complete paper record of who voted for who. the system will be accountable for its results instead of just numbers in an access database that could have been tampered with.

It's easy to envision an instance where an individual dedicated to corrupting the vote stations himself within the voting station, observing the voters as they leave the booth and deposit their receipt.

Those voters that don't bother examining their receipts can be easily discerned, and the voting machine could conceivably be instructed remotely to change that voter's vote.

This is a very good step being taken by California, but I think they need to go one step further and mandate a recount for every electi

Or you could dig a tunnel under the vote station and use a saw to make a hole under the box where all the paper votes are kept. Then when a paper gets fed to the box, you will take it and replace it with another vote of your liking. Don't forgot to wear a tinfoil hat during the operation.

It is funny. I mean, we all know that nobody would ever go to such lengths to obtain power.

Nobody would ever do that.

Not once in the history of this nation, or of the world for that matter, has anyone ever conspired to steal power.

All those stories you hear about fraud and elections in the past, they're all made up. Nobody ever stuffed ballot boxes. Nobody ever denied the right to vote to minorities. Nobody ever bought votes, or intimidated voters on their way to the booth, or bribed election officia

Remember that the receipt is actually a printed ballot, put into a ballot box at the polling place just like the current ballots. If the machine printed out one thing but recorded another, then during the inevitable recount (in CA a recount is automatic if the margin is less than a certain amount) they'll find a discrepancy between the results of the recount and the results reported by the machine. You start seeing that in several recounts, especially if it changes the outcome of the election, and there'll

I wish they didn't say "receipt". A receipt is a piece of paper that memorializes a done deal, and that you take home with you. The thing these machines are required to print out is a ballot. It gets dropped in a ballot box and is the authoritative record of how you voted, if the electronic count is suspect in some way.

How do you know it says the right thing? Well, uh, you look at it before you drop it in the ballot box. That's why it's called a "voter-verifiable" paper audit trail. If Alice is runn